The Traitor: A Tommy Carmellini Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  I checked my watch and, exactly at twenty-one minutes past eight in the evening, stepped out of a Left Bank bar onto the sidewalk. I turned right and was walking along when a blue Citroën pulled over to the curb. A man was in the right seat with his window rolled down, and he was smoking a cigarette. I recognized him; his name was Rich Thurlow, and he was originally from Brooklyn. “Need a ride?” he said, just loud enough for me to hear.

  “Yeah,” I said. I opened the rear passenger door and climbed in. The car was in motion again as I slammed the door. I lay down in the rear seat.

  Rich turned around and looked at me. He nodded toward the driver. “You know Al.”

  “Hey there,” I said, and tried to make myself comfortable. The back seats of Citroëns are not designed for guys over six feet to lie down in.

  “Hey,” the driver said, and concentrated on driving.

  “Long time no see,” Rich said. He tossed his weed out the window and fished another from a pack in his shirt pocket.

  “So how’s everything?” I asked.

  “The frogs had two cars on us tonight. We led them around for about an hour before we put some moves on them.” They laughed.

  Well, if you couldn’t brag a little about your exploits, why be a spy?

  “Think you’re clean?”

  “Yeah, but hell, you never know. Fucking frogs…”

  I sat up, putting my head into one corner so I would be difficult to see from a trailing car. “Won’t getting ditched make them suspicious?”

  “Would if this was the first time we did it,” Al Salazar said with a laugh. “We do it every time we go anyplace. They expect us to. They play the game awhile and let us go.”

  Or follow unobtrusively. Well, this was Thurlow and Salazar’s station—all I could do was hope they knew what they were doing.

  I knew them both, so I had reason to believe they did. Rich Thurlow and I had broken into a bank in Zurich, among other things. I had known him for about three years. He had a wife who cheated on him if left alone too long and a teenaged son who experimented with marijuana. He lived to fish and carried a telescoping rod with him everywhere. He even fished in the Seine during his lunch hour.

  Alberto Salazar and I had worked together during my four months in Iraq. We ran on-the-job experiments with new technology to detect explosives through walls and in vehicles. He was about five and a half feet tall, very athletic, and single. Al was from Texas and spoke machine-gun-quick Spanish. His English was lightly accented, his Arabic pretty good, and his French tolerable; he could cuss a blue streak in any of those languages. He had an innate grasp of how a thing should work, so he was easy on the equipment and got results.

  In short, Thurlow and Salazar were competent career professionals. When I told Grafton that I didn’t trust my colleagues, that statement might have conveyed a false impression. I had no specific complaints against anyone. And yet…sometimes it seemed that the harder we worked, the fewer results we had to show for it. Now and then a subject found out we were doing surveillance, or the other side transferred the guy we wanted somewhere else, making him unavailable, or people stopped talking in rooms we had bugged. Things are going to go wrong occasionally—that’s life—yet it seemed to me that in Europe, especially in Europe, things went wrong a little too much. Occasionally. Nothing I could put my finger on. Or maybe I’ve been in this game too long.

  Hell, maybe we all had.

  “So Goldberg says you want a brief.”

  “That’s right. Need to know everything you know about Henri Rodet.”

  Both men turned to look at me. Salazar got his eyes back on the road two seconds later as Rich whistled. “Rodet, huh? Gonna start right at the top and work down.”

  “Yeah. I want to see DGSE headquarters and Rodet’s residences. I hear he has a flat in Paris and a château somewhere outside the city.”

  “Well, yeah, we can do that,” Salazar said, glancing at me again in the rearview mirror.

  “Gonna get to know him better, are you?” Rich muttered. “I know him on sight, but that’s it. Never met the man and don’t want to. Real asshole, from what I hear—one hard, ruthless, tough son of a bitch. Made a lot of money somehow or other and runs a tight ship. Used to be the DGSE was a bunch of Inspector Clouseaus with attitudes, strictly amateur hour. Every naughty little thing they did got leaked to the press. You opened the morning paper to see what the spooks had been up to last night. Murders, kidnappings, smears of political enemies—they did it all. Rodet stopped the leaks. Hasn’t been a leak in years. They may be doing the same stuff, but you won’t read about it in Le Monde.”

  Salazar was wending his way through the streets as Rich talked. I could see his right eye in the rearview mirror. His eyes never stopped moving—checking the mirrors, looking at traffic to the right and left, oncoming, checking pedestrians…

  Rich finally tired of talking about the French spooks and got started on Paris station gossip. He and Salazar gave me the latest on the boss, George Goldberg, who was trying to eat his way through every restaurant in Paris during his tour. He had eaten in 237, by his count, according to Salazar. They discussed the possibility that George might be lying about that number. They condemned George’s practice of eating dinner in one establishment and dessert in another and adding both to his list.

  Rolling through the streets and listening to my colleagues gab, I thought about how nice it was to once again be in a place that had toilet paper in the restrooms. I have a theory about toilet paper: Social organization is required to get it into the restrooms, public education tells the average Joe what it is and how to use it, and public order prevents the first guy who sees the stuff from stealing it. Paris had all three; Baghdad none of them.

  Salazar rolled into a square and found a spot at the curb where we could sit for a moment. He pointed. “Over there, the second building from the left, second floor above the arcade. That’s Henri Rodet’s apartment.”

  I thought I knew the square. “Isn’t this the Place des Vosges?”

  “Yeah. These houses date from the Renaissance. They’re about four hundred years old.”

  “So which apartment does Rodet have?”

  “Man, he’s got a whole floor. Not that the flats are all that big, but they’re cool, y’know?”

  “Who does he keep here? Wife or mistress?”

  “Top secret stuff like that is way above my pay grade,” Salazar said solemnly.

  “You see him, you ask him,” Rich chimed in. “Then tell us.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me out. Come back and get me in thirty minutes.”

  “Sure.”

  I got out of the car, and Salazar got it under way.

  Nine symmetrical houses lined the east, west and south sides of the square, with seven on the north. Whoever designed it four hundred years ago was probably very uptight. If you really like symmetry, this is the sort of thing you will like. A people place, complete with sidewalks, trees and wrought-iron benches, formed the interior of the square. The ground floors of all the houses formed an arcade that stuck out over the sidewalk. When the houses were built back in the good old days, pedestrians were probably grateful for the arcade since the folks in the top floors of the houses emptied their chamber pots out the windows into the streets, symmetry or no symmetry. France had its pre-toilet-paper era, too. The wonder is that the people lived long enough to reproduce.

  I walked across the park toward Rodet’s building as I looked it over. Streetlights lit the fronts of the buildings, so every feature was visible. Some of the windows had drapes, others did not. Some buildings, especially those on the west side of the square, looked as if they were being renovated. That meant contractors and craftsmen and their vehicles.

  I could see lights in Rodet’s windows. He had four windows, two with drapes and two without. The main entrance to the building was off the arcade. I looked for security cameras and didn’t see any. Still, the head of the DGSE probably rated a bodyguard or two, and no doubt th
ey were upstairs or somewhere out here on the square, keeping watch.

  There was a walkway under the center building in the block, so I passed through. Sure enough, a narrow alley led behind all the buildings. Metal fire escapes were arranged on the exterior walls. There should be a rear staircase, too, I reasoned, because even before fire escapes, people in buildings didn’t want to be trapped.

  I walked along the alley and found doors into each building, although whether the doors were original or later alterations was impossible to say. The locks were old large-key door locks, the kind that were popular in Europe between the world wars. They probably dated from a renovation during that period, which I thought must have been the last major one. I glanced at Rodet’s back door. It was not alarmed, at least on the exterior, but high above, pointed down at a fairly steep angle, I saw a security camera. The thing seemed to be aimed straight at the doorway. If the video feed was not monitored inside the building, then it must be monitored offsite, which meant there was a dedicated telephone line or an Internet connection. I continued strolling along the alley, craning my neck left and right like your average tourist.

  If you think it would be easy to go in through Rodet’s back door, think again. I would have bet serious money that the old door was there because local ordinances prevented exterior modifications on historical buildings. Immediately inside, I suspected, was another door, a steel one with terrific locks, festooned with alarms. Yet the exterior walls, with old metal drainpipes coming down off the roofs, could be climbed.

  When I got back in the square I looked again at the roofs. Above Rodet’s apartment was an attic with dormer windows. I wondered if that attic was part of his apartment. A careful man could go over the roof and enter through one of those windows. It was something to think about.

  I was also thinking about Marisa Petrou, Rodet’s mistress. Could I use the fact that I knew her to gain entrance to this apartment?

  I spent the rest of my half hour just looking, trying to make the scene and details stick in the gray matter. Alberto Salazar and Rich Thurlow arrived right on time to pick me up.

  “I thought we’d look at DGSE headquarters tonight and save the château for tomorrow,” Rich said after I was in and the car was rolling again.

  “Sure. Drive on.”

  We hadn’t gone two blocks before Salazar said, “Sure is different from Iraq, isn’t it?” He directed that comment at me. “There’s a place I don’t miss, let me tell you. Squalor, dirt, heat, fanatics, car bombs, blood on the street, body parts strewn around…It’s the contrast, y’know? I have nightmares about the place. How about you, Tommy?”

  “Hard to forget a resort spa like that,” I agreed.

  “Remember that time we located those explosives inside that house, and when the soldiers surrounded the place, that woman walked out? She was wearing one of those chadors, those black robes that cover her head to toe, and she had a baby in her arms, a kid maybe a year old. She walked right toward the lieutenant.”

  I knew how this story ended, and I wasn’t in the mood for it. “Let’s talk about something else, Al,” I suggested.

  He ignored me. He glanced at Rich to ensure he was listening and continued. “She was walking toward the lieutenant and interpreter, who were standing behind an APC, when she blew up. Had explosives around her waist in some kind of belt. Goddamnedest thing I ever saw. One instant she and the kid were there, then they weren’t. Gone in the blink of an eye. When the smoke and shit cleared so we could see, there were little pieces of skin and bone and bloody tissue splattered for blocks. Everybody was watching when the bomb went off, so everybody got hit with this stuff, and six or eight guys got scratched up with shrapnel or something.”

  “That’s enough, Al,” I said.

  “If they try to send me back, I’m quitting.”

  “Okay,” Thurlow said, “but enough’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more, either.”

  “Fuck you,” Al shot back. “You too, Carmellini! Fuck both you dickheads.”

  Of course, he would be the guy behind the wheel. He was hunched over, gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles were turning white, staring straight ahead as the car rolled along.

  “Hey, man, it’s over,” I said, trying to calm him. “You’re out of the sewer. Lay it down and let it go.”

  “If I can’t talk to you guys about it, who the hell can I talk to?”

  That, I thought, was the most insightful question I had heard in years. Be that as it may, I still didn’t want to chin about Iraq with Al Salazar or anybody on planet Earth.

  If I never again set foot in Iraq, that would be fine by me. Remembering Grafton’s promise, I silently vowed to make this assignment my very last for the agency. After this, you can color me gone. Au revoir, baby.

  The French spooks, the DGSE, had their offices in an unlikely building, the Conciergerie. This was an old, old building on the Ile de la Cité that had been used for a lot of things down through the centuries, including a prison. Here the revolutionaries imprisoned Marie Antoinette and Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat, as well as Danton and Robespierre before they each made their one-way trip to the guillotine. The history came from Rich Thurlow, who had apparently spent a few evenings with a guidebook. He said that during the Revolution over four thousand prisoners were held here. We found a place to park and did some walking.

  Standing on the right, or north, bank and staring at the building, I thought it looked ominous. It was made of cut stone and stood about six or seven stories high—it was hard to say because I didn’t know how high the ceilings inside were. There were towers where the walls cornered, and the whole thing had one of those Paris roofs broken with dormers. The place had obviously been built as a medieval palace. In those happy days a palace was a fortress, a stronghold, where the king’s men could hold off starving mobs or armies led by unhappy lords and barons. The river had been the moat. No crocodiles, but since the Seine was the city sewer, who needed them?

  “When was that thing built?” I asked Thurlow, our walking Baedeker.

  “Thirteenth or fourteenth century. It’s roughly contemporary with Sainte-Chapelle, which is immediately on the other side of it.”

  I knew about Sainte-Chapelle, a magnificent medieval church that King Louis IX built in the thirteenth century to house Christ’s crown of thorns and fragments of the true cross. He purchased these relics, properly authenticated, of course, from the emperor of Constantinople for an outrageous fortune. No doubt the emperor laughed all the way to the bank. This transaction set the record for the largest swindle ever successfully completed, a record that stood for centuries. If you take inflation into account, it may still be the con to beat. The pope was so impressed that he made Louis a saint; the good folks in Missouri even named a city after him.

  Staring at the walls of the Conciergerie, I wasn’t in a laughing mood. I saw my share of old black-and-white movies when I was growing up, so I knew damn well what they had in the dungeons of that rockpile: lots of cells and a torture chamber. Probably had a rack and screw and a wall where they hung people in chains, the way the King of Id tortures the Spook. Just looking at those massive sandstone walls gave me the willies. I turned and looked the other way. Well, heck, half of Paris was to the north, and half to the south.

  “You going in there?” Rich said, jerking his head at the building.

  “I sure as hell hope not. But I do what Grafton tells me. He says go, I’m off like a racehorse.”

  “More like a mouse.”

  “That’s probably a better analogy, I suppose.”

  “Better you than me.”

  We discussed equipment, what they had on hand and what they could get in a reasonable amount of time. “Bugs,” I said. “Audio and video. How many?”

  “We got about twenty of each on hand. Most of them are the new ones, so tiny you could swallow them and listen to your lunch digest.”

  I grunted. One of my instructors had done just that to demonstrate the capabi
lity of the new units. It had been funny…then!

  “Take me to a subway station and drop me off,” I said. “Tomorrow, when you’re clean, you come along this street right here, and I’ll be standing over there by that bus stop. About ten in the morning. Will that be enough time?”

  “It’s after rush hour. We should be clean by then.”

  “Have the guy driving the van meet us somewhere. I want to see him and the stuff in the van.”

  “Okay,” Rich said, and flipped a cigarette away.

  Al stood looking at the Conciergerie with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. Finally he pulled one out, turned his jacket collar up to ward off the late-evening chill, then jammed that hand back where it belonged and started walking toward the car, which was two blocks away.

  “Assholes,” he muttered.

  I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the French spooks or his present companions. He was going to be fun to be around for the next few weeks.

  Jake Grafton had an interview with Sarah Houston at the American embassy.

  “So how are you and Carmellini getting along?”

  “Fine,” she snapped. She had no intention of discussing her relationship with Tommy Carmellini with anybody alive.

  “Do you have any objection to working with him?”

  “I have absolutely no desire to go back to Alderson.’ She had served some time in the federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. “To stay out of the can I’ll work with the devil.”

  “I don’t think we have to dig that deep for recruits just yet,” Grafton said with a straight face. “I merely wished to confirm that you had no objection to working with Mr. Carmellini.”

  She shook her head. Although her lips were compressed in a thin line, Grafton noticed, she seemed relaxed.